Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2, pp.

187-201

The Canadian Legal System, the Robert Latimer Case, and

the Rhetorical Construction of (Dis)ability: “Bodies that
Matter?”

Dr. Sally Hayward

University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge, Alberta,

This paper considers Judge Ted Noble’s 1997 ruling of

the Latimer case in terms of how it rhetorically
constructs and privileges the normal, able-bodied status
quo, while, at the same time, deconstructs and positions
as inferior the “abnormal,” dis-abled minority. In this
case, Noble not only took the unprecedented step of
granting Robert Latimer—the Saskatchewan farmer who
killed his twelve-year-old disabled daughter, Tracy, by
putting her into the front seat of his truck and poisoning
her with carbon monoxide gas—a constitutional
exemption, but also attempted to create a lenient
category of murder called compassionate homicide.
Although Latimer’s eventual conviction of second-
degree murder in 2001 might imply that justice was
done, the violent and decidedly unconstitutional
rhetoric employed by Noble points to the way in which
the law legitimates normative models of personhood
and citizenship that rest, problematically, on the
elimination, figuratively and literally, of people, who,
like Tracy Latimer, disturb the “normal” vision and
would, in Noble’s terms, be “better off dead.”
* * *
On October 24th, 1993, Robert Latimer took Tracy, his severely disabled,
twelve-year-old daughter, put her in the front seat of his truck and
poisoned her with carbon monoxide gas. His confession tells how, while
his wife and his other children were at church, he sat on the back of his
188 Sally Hayward

truck and watched for over half an hour as his eldest child died.
Although his confession to the police revealed that his crime was
premeditated—he considered “a number of ways of putting her out of
her misery but finally settled on putting her to sleep with carbon
monoxide gas” (Her Majesty the Queen and Robert W. Latimer, 1994.
p.294)—his charge was dropped from first to second-degree murder.1 In
this 1994 trial, Latimer was sentenced to the mandatory sentence for
second degree murder: twenty years in prison, with no eligibility for
parole for ten years. Because Mark Brayford, Latimer’s lawyer,
successfully appealed this decision, charging the Crown Prosecutor,
Randy Kirkham, with obstructing justice through jury tampering, a new
trial was ordered. This second trial took place in 1997.

In this second trial, Latimer was also found guilty. However, in this trial,
Justice Ted Noble, calling Latimer’s crime an act of “compassionate
homicide,” chose not to sentence Latimer to the mandatory ten years in
prison. Instead, he took the unprecedented step of giving Latimer a
constitutional exemption, sentencing him to only two years
imprisonment, with one of these years to be served on his farm (R v
Latimer, Ruling. 1997 Electronic Publication). Although this decision was
overturned in 1998 and the overturn was upheld by the Supreme Court
in 2001, Judge Noble’s decision is significant because it reveals the
extent to which the law is “thoroughly imbued with relations of power”
(Foucault, 1988, p. 60), positing and attempting to make “real” the
“ideality” of a just and good society, at the same time as it rhetorically
constructs, endorses, and reifies an inherently violent, unjust, normative,
and able-bodied reality.

This paper considers the legal construction of this normative able-bodied

reality by examining how its authority rests at least in part on the violent

1
First-degree murder is more serious than second-degree murder; it involves
premeditation and is generally believed to involve a “vengeful, hateful and
violent act designed specifically to accomplish the death of the victim” (R v
Latimer, Ruling, 1997). In the case of first-degree murder, the “offender is
denied parole for 25 years.” Second-degree murder is less serious, and, although
the “moral blameworthiness of murder can vary from one convicted offender to
another,” the offender, in this case, is eligible to apply for parole after ten years.
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
 The Canadian Legal System, the Robert Latimer Case 189

and violating negative legal construction of disability. In other words,

these narratives are not only representative of a philosophically abstract
way of viewing the world; they have negative consequences in real life,
functioning as a form of rhetorical and visual surveillance that, in turn,
authorizes “other forms of bodily invasion” (Feldman, 1999, p. 27). From
this perspective, Noble’s ruling goes beyond a justification of what
Latimer “deserves” by forcing a consideration of how legal
interpretation perpetuates and legitimates a rhetorical violence that has
potentially serious consequences for the real, lived experiences of people
with disabilities.

Speaking to not only a rhetorical, rational ideology, but also to a visual

ideology, these legal interpretations enable a collective imagination that
views Tracy and, by extension, all people with disabilities, as almost
already dead. By constructing and fixing Tracy in the perpetual pose of
pain and disfigurement, these authoritative and authorial legal
interpretations constitute an act of imaginative violence that both
precedes and looks forward to the material act of violence that is
destined to be repeated. In other words, these legal interpretations
preserve a gaze that takes as normal the previous violence towards
people with disabilities, while channelling, and possibly materializing
this violence in the future. In this way, it is possible to argue that the
penetration of Tracy’s body and life by the visual and narrative
examination in the courts exacerbates the violence that has already been
perpetuated against her. Working as a form of surveillance, these
interpretations, as the Disability-Rights Coalition so accurately pointed
out, “threaten the lives of people with disabilities,” warning them that
those in authority—parents, judges, social workers—do, and may
continue to, wield “unfettered power” at their expense (CCD Latimer
Watch: “Factum Excerpts,” 1998, Electronic Source).2
In this respect, Justice Ted Noble’s decision legitimates Latimer’s
“mercy killing” by objectifying and enabling a visualization of Tracy,

2
While this paper necessarily focuses more on the rhetorical construction of
Tracy Latimer, it is important to acknowledge the way in which the media
visually depicts both Tracy and Robert Latimer. More work needs to be
undertaken in this area.
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
190 Sally Hayward

Latimer’s daughter, as a disabled “other,” as a body that, in James I.

Porter’s (2004) words, “appears to lack something essential, something
that would make it identifiable and something to identify with” (p. xiii);
in this way, Tracy becomes “too little a body: a body that is deficiently
itself, not quite a body in the full sense of the word, not real enough (p.
xiii). In refusing to acknowledge the complexities of Tracy’s lived
experience and by speaking of her only in negative terms, Justice Noble
not only constructs Tracy as an absent presence that is not quite “real
enough” to be considered a human being, with all the rights that this
implies, but establishes a way of thinking about dis-abled “others” that
imagines them through the inevitability of and, indeed, even the need for
their “compassionate deaths” (R v Latimer, Ruling. 1997).3

Bound by the rules and regulations of legal discourse, Noble’s

judgement, on an initial reading, appears to offer a thoughtful, rational
interpretation of the Latimer case. Conforming to the requirements for
the written justification of legal rulings, Noble demonstrates his
understanding of the case in relation to constitutional and criminal law,
and in relation to other cases that set precedents for understanding the
Latimer case. In this respect, Mark Brayford’s use of section 12 of the
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, (1982)— “Everyone has the right
not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment”
(Canadian Charter, 1982, Electronic Source)—to argue that the
mandatory minimum for second-degree murder was, in Latimer’s case,
“harsh and more than excessive,” requires Noble to consider this claim
in relation to other section 12 challenges (R v Latimer, Ruling, 1997).
Referencing “Laskin C.J.C. in Miller,” Noble states that he agrees with
Laskin when he argues that “the phrase cruel and unusual [is] a
‘compendious expression of a norm’” and, as such, demands that the
“punishment prescribed” be considered in terms of the extent to which it
“is so excessive as to outrage standards of decency” (R v Latimer, Ruling,

3
Responding to Noble’s construction of Tracy, the Disability-Rights Coalition
writes that “this Court should not see Tracy Latimer only in terms of her
disabilities. Her status as a human being must be paramount. Her disability
cannot be used as a justification from departing from fundamental constitutional
values. She was a person first and that fact must not be obscured by the detail of
her medical problems” (CCD Latimer Watch: “Factum Excerpts,” 1998).
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
 The Canadian Legal System, the Robert Latimer Case 191

1997). While the relationship between decency and the norm is not
elucidated, it is possible to assume from Noble’s reading of the meaning
behind section 12 that, although the state may impose punishment, “the
effect of that punishment must not be grossly disproportionate to what
would have been appropriate,” as that appropriateness is read within a
decent, normative framework of understanding (R v Latimer, Ruling,
1997).

It is, as the Disability-Rights Coalition argue in their factum for the 1998
appeal, this normative able-bodied framework of understanding that
allows Latimer to twist the normative requirement, that he is, as a
parent, responsible for Tracy’s care, into an insistence that it was
“somehow justifiable for him to murder his child (CCD Latimer Watch:
“Factum Excerpts,” 1998). Subverting the notion that the murder was a
“cruel and unusual punishment” for Tracy, whose only crime was that
she was alive, and arguing instead that it was a “cruel and unusual
punishment” for Latimer, essentially “offend[ing] his Charter rights,” is
a twist in logic that makes the premeditated filicidal murderer, a victim
of his own crime (CCD Latimer Watch: “Factum Excerpts,” 1998). This
paradoxical use and, I would argue, abuse of legal logic does not escape
the Coalition, who point out that, while it might seem logical to argue
that “there is no room in Canadian law” for either a “system where
sentencing is put on a sliding scale depending on the characteristics of
the victim,” or for a “doctrine that would literally fix disabled people
with an ongoing burden to ‘justify their existence,’” in the Latimer case,
the burden is put not on Latimer, but on Tracy and her defence, to prove
that she was a “normal” human being, who could justify consideration
as such in the Canadian courts of law (CCD Latimer Watch: “Factum
Excerpts,” 1998).

In judging this case, Noble does not, however, articulate how his
decision is informed by these normative expectations and assumptions,
which operate recursively to assign meaning to both Latimer and his
daughter, Tracy, according to “decent” societal norms and liberal
expectations and assumptions that favour Latimer and the notion, if not
the practice, of mercy killing (Teubner, 1988, p. 4); Noble’s privileging of
Latimer, as an able-bodied, able-minded father, can be seen, however,
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
192 Sally Hayward

when he references Justice Cory’s argument, in Steel v. Mountain

Institution, in an attempt to argue that Latimer’s earlier ten-year sentence
constituted one of the “rare and unique occasions that a court will find a
sentence so grossly disproportionate that it violates the provisions of s.12
of the Charter” (R v Latimer, Ruling, 1997). Reading Latimer’s second-
degree murder charge, with its mandatory ten-year sentence, as one of
these rare and unique occasions, Noble insists that Latimer’s sentence is
a “cruel and unusual” punishment that violates Charter mandates . In
refusing to take into account how Latimer’s premeditated “mercy
killing” of his daughter constitutes a cruel or unusual murder that is
deserving of justice, Noble trivializes the Charter, and the legal demand,
articulated by Justice Cory and reiterated by Noble, that “[t]he test for
determining whether a sentence is disproportionately long is very
properly stringent and demanding” (R. v. Latimer, Ruling, 1997).
Constituting not a stringent test, but a lesser test, Noble’s reading of
section 12, and his subsequent decision to grant Latimer a constitutional
exemption, tends to trivialize not only the Charter but, also, I would add,
Tracy Latimer’s life and, by extension, the equal rights of the disabled,
whose lives may well depend on a fair and just ruling.

While Noble’s “stringent and demanding” argument clearly supports the

belief put forward by Latimer’s defence that the “punishment
prescribed” to Latimer “is so excessive as to outrage the [normative]
standards of decency,” it also goes one step further by suggesting that
the legal system should support what, “for want of a better term,” Noble
calls “compassionate homicide” (R. v. Latimer, Ruling, 1997). In this way,
Noble belies his own claim that he cannot “consider general deterrence
or other penological purposes that go beyond the particular offender in
determining a sentence” (R, v. Latimer, Ruling, 1997 my italics). Going
beyond a consideration of Latimer and his offence, Noble stresses that if
he does not grant Latimer a constitutional exemption, “it is unlikely that
any set of facts will ever arise where this rarely granted legal remedy can
be made available to one who commits an act of compassionate
homicide” (R. v. Latimer, Ruling, 1997).4

4
In the 1998 appeal, the Coalition stressed “the importance of the deterrent
function of the law,” which “cannot be overemphasized” (CCD Latimer Watch:
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
 The Canadian Legal System, the Robert Latimer Case 193

The potential of this ruling to endorse a “legal remedy” for the offender
who has committed or who desires to commit an act of “compassionate
homicide,” points to the ability of law and legal interpretations to, as
Judith Butler (1993) argues, “[echo] forth” or reinvoke new laws or new
policies that, while embodying the legal authority to discursively make
and remake bodies and subjectivities, always ultimately restructures
reality in its own normative image (p. 107). In other words, the law
affirms and perpetuates the status quo, legitimating certain experiences
and certain subjectivities over others by “officially approving and
accepting, and transforming into fact” the experiences of the normative
majority, while “officially distrust[ing], reject[ing], [and finding] to be
untrue” the experiences of non-normative minorities (Teubner, 1988, p.
279).

While this legitimation of the norm makes clear, in Butler’s (1993) terms,
that “what is invoked by the one who speaks or inscribes the law is the
fiction of a speaker who wields the authority to make his words binding,
the legal incarnation of the divine utterance” (p. 107), it also suggests
law’s ability to constitutively endorse and legitimate “organized, social
practices of violence,” both a “violence which has already occurred” (as
in Latimer’s case) and a violence which “is about to occur,” or be
repeated (p. 107). Evidence of this repetition can be seen in the increasing
support for and the growing occurrence of assisted-suicide or mercy
killings in Canada (Cover, 1995, p. 203).5

“Exemption Quashed,” 1998). To support this point, Grant Mitchell’s speech

made at the vigils for Tracy Latimer was quoted: “As a parent of a disabled
teenager, I need to know that my daughter, already made vulnerable by nature,
will not be made even more vulnerable by our laws. The Charter s we all have
equal protection of the law, how else to measure that ‘equal protection’ than by
the criminal liability of those who commit the crimes—the offense they are
found guilty of and the sentence they receive. That is what deters” (CCD
Latimer Watch: “Exemption Quashed,” 1998).
5
In this respect, Dick Sobsey points out that “in the years ensuing since Tracy’s
murder, the community of persons with disabilities has witnessed more killings:
Ryan Wilkieson, Katie Lynn Baker, Charles Blais, Andrea Halpin. The murder
of Tracy Latimer was not an isolated incident” (CCD Latimer Watch:
“Exemption Quashed,” 1998). Interestingly, in his judgement, Noble himself
cites a few such cases. Although these cases do not relate directly to the Latimer
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
194 Sally Hayward

What interests me here is how this violent repetition, contained within

the legal narratives, the visual representations, the judgments and public
interpretations of this case, creates the circumstances for what Allen
Feldman (1999) calls “the circumscribed and enforced space of the
politically real” (p. 37). The ideological rationality that informs Judge
Noble’s support for Latimer and the practice of compassionate homicide
not only lends these acts credence, but attempts to enforce an acceptance
of them in real-life practices. An examination of how Noble imposes this
meaning, and how this meaning functions ideologically to establish
ways of seeing and knowing that perpetuate violent acts against those
who, like Tracy Latimer, are “repeatedly assumed, whereby ‘assumption’
is not a singular act or event, but, rather, an iterable practice,” to be
“better off dead” is informative of a political agenda that devalues
people with disabilities (Butler, 1993, p. 108).

In practical terms, because Noble’s desire for a “stringent and

demanding” examination of this case constitutes in large part a recourse,
or a number of recourses, to a legislative norm, he reiterates previous
citations made by Gonthier J. in R. v. Goltz and by Lamer J. in R. v. Smith.
These citations demand that, in section 12 challenges, the “court must
first consider the gravity of the offence, the personal characteristics of the
offender and the particular circumstances of the case” (R. v. Latimer,
Ruling, 1997). This context will supposedly allow Noble to judge
whether the mandatory ten-year sentence “prescribed by law” is, in
Latimer’s case, “grossly disproportionate” (R. v. Latimer, Ruling, 1997).

In considering these facts, Noble pits the rights of Robert Latimer against
the rights of his daughter, Tracy. Refusing Kirkham’s depiction in the
first trial of Latimer “as a cold-blooded killer . . . [a] foul, callous, cold,
calculating” man, who is “not motivated by anything other than making

case, in that his examples document the assisted-suicides of aged or terminally-

ill people, he uses them as evidence that Latimer, similar to the perpetrators of
the other cases, deserves a minimal sentence. On another note, this increasing
support for assisted-suicide or mercy killings is also seen in the United States, as
can be seen in relation to the Terry Schiavo case. The public support for her
husband’s desire to let her die by starvation and dehydration can be paralleled to
the public support for Latimer in Canada.
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
 The Canadian Legal System, the Robert Latimer Case 195

his own life easier” (Her Majesty The Queen and Robert W. Latimer, 1994. p.
355), Noble promotes instead the image of Latimer as a model citizen: a
“responsible and hard working farmer . . . a devoted family man with a
loving and caring nature . . . a caring and responsible person, . . . and a
loving and protective parent” (R v Latimer, Ruling, 1997).

In keeping with this character reading, Noble rejects the accusation made
in the first trial that Latimer killed Tracy because she was disabled.
Stressing that Latimer was a loving, protective parent, “devoted to this
child” and her care, Noble argues repeatedly that all the evidence
indicated that Latimer’s concern was not for Tracy’s disability, but for
her pain. In a paragraph that begins with the question, “[w]hy did he do
it?,” Noble stresses that Latimer’s “only concern was Tracy’s ongoing
pain” (R v Latimer, Ruling, 1997).

Noble, however, in a similar way to Mark Brayford, Latimer’s lawyer, is

unable ultimately to separate Tracy’s pain from her disability. In arguing
that Latimer was motivated by “his concern for her pain which he saw
flowing from her illness,” he conflates, unintentionally, illness and
disability, suggesting that they contributed not only to her pain, but to
her “slowly but steadily deteriorating health” (R. v. Latimer, Ruling,
1997). In doing this, Noble, echoing Brayford, reiterates only a superficial
pseudo-medical expertise that ignores the fact that cerebral palsy is not
an illness, but a non-progressive condition affecting body movement and
muscle coordination. The claim that Latimer killed his daughter solely
on account of her “unremitting” pain can be read more accurately as an
attempt to first provide a loving context for Tracy’s murder, thereby
making it acceptable and, second, as a political attempt to avoid
accusations of discriminative violence against people with disabilities. In
this respect, Latimer’s claim that he felt “he must do his duty as her
father to relieve her of [the] prospect” of her “present and future pain”
can only be read in terms of an attempt to use his relationship with Tracy
to make his underlying discrimination against the disabled palatable
and, of course, political (R v. Latimer, Ruling, 1997).

While Latimer is not portrayed as being in need of any rehabilitation for

doing what he perceived to be his “duty” as a father, Tracy is figured
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
196 Sally Hayward

here as being beyond rehabilitation, and beyond any meaningful

identification outside of her physical disability and outside of her pain
and inescapable suffering.6 The cumulative effect of this debilitating
discourse results in a construction that imagines Tracy as a metaphor for
suffering and pain. Known through her “present and future pain” and
through the unimaginable “extent of . . . [her] suffering,” Latimer’s
decision to “alleviate her suffering” by “[taking] the matter of Tracy’s
pain into his own hands” in order to “[put] her out of her misery”
becomes understandable precisely because she ceases to be a person in
the full sense of the term, lacking “something essential, something that
would make [her] identifiable” as human in the “normal” sense of the
word (R v Latimer, Ruling, 1997).

This metaphorical construction of Tracy imposes a reality that refuses

any other way of knowing her. The repetitious, consistent representation
of her as non-human, in all her many dis-abled forms, speaks to a
political agenda that utilizes the language of metaphor to create a visual
“realist mode of depiction and perception” (Feldman, 1999, p. 43). This
depiction clarifies and reifies Tracy’s place in “a hierarchy of credibility
and fact setting,” while also, concomitantly, establishing as an acceptable
methodology, “a public form of truth claiming and depictive
legitimation” (p. 43). Reading and visualizing her as a helpless baby, an
animal, or as a “pain-filled bundle of needs” refuses to acknowledge
either her mother’s claim that she was a “very happy, very happy little
girl” (Her Majesty the Queen and Robert Latimer, 1994. p. 331) or the entries
in Tracy’s school communication book that documented her “good
times”—“eating, sleeping, participating in school and family activities,
playing, making choices and being a little mischievous” (Enns, 1999, p.
34)—and enacts a rhetorical and visual violence that is a prelude to
accepting the inevitability of her actual physical death. This violence is
imagined not only metaphorically by reducing Tracy to her pain and
suffering, but also discursively through her construction as an object of

6
Again, a parallel can be made to the Terry Schiavo case. It is only when it is
clear that any attempts at rehabilitation are not going to restore Schiavo to her
former “normal” self, that her husband gives up, and starts lobbying for her
death.
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
 The Canadian Legal System, the Robert Latimer Case 197

pseudo-scientific inquiry. In this construction, she becomes known

through a rhetoric of mutilation that paradoxically deconstructs her in an
attempt to recreate her as an always-already dismembered body: as
some-“thing” not even her father could put back together again.

In order to stress the “enormity of [Latimer’s] task” in caring for Tracy,

Noble summarizes the surgical operations that Tracy undergoes
throughout her life, documenting how, at the age of four, an operation
“to cut her muscles and tendons” meant that she was “left with a flail
limb,” how at nine years she was “placed in a cast from chest to toes,”
and how by 1992, “her body had become so twisted out of shape that the
surgeon placed steel rods in her back to straighten her body.” Known
through her “radical [surgeries]” (R v Latimer, Ruling. 1997)—her cuts,
body casts, rods, and resulting debilitating pain—and known
synechdochally through her flail limbs, her dysfunctional hips, back,
head, arms, muscles, joints, and tendons, Tracy is visually and
imaginatively taken apart. In this rhetoric she is, as in “real” life, “so
twisted out of shape” that the reader is led to believe that her condition
is not only deteriorating (R v Latimer, Ruling, 1997), but also that she
constitutes a body that is, in James I. Porter’s (2004) terms, only
“deficiently itself” (p. xiii). In this way, it can be argued, that Tracy was
living a torturous life, a living death.

Noble’s rhetoric supports Latimer’s attempt to put Tracy “out of her

misery,” justifying her “actual” death, while providing a context for
thinking about other offenders of what Noble calls, “euthanasia-type
mercy killings” of the “severely disabled” (R. v. Latimer, Ruling, 1997).
Because Noble suggests that those who commit “the grave act [of]
murder,” killing out of “self interest, malevolence, hate or violence” and
those who kill for “caring and altruistic reasons,” assuming the role of
“surrogate decision maker[s],” represent widely different levels of
culpability, he is able to argue, by analogous extension, that they warrant
the creation of a new category of criminal law: one that falls under the
rubric of “compassionate homicide” (R v Latimer, Ruling, 1997).

According to Judge Noble, this lenient move to excuse the perpetrators

of “mercy killings” is supported by public opinion. Claiming that the
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
198 Sally Hayward

first trial’s imposition of the mandatory minimum ten-year sentence for

second-degree murder provoked “an unprecedented public reaction
against the severity of the punishment,” Noble argues that “there is
considerable evidence that this case and the life sentence without parole
for ten years imposed (or to be imposed) on Mr. Latimer is seen by the
public who responded in this manner as an outrage” (R v Latimer, Ruling,
1997). He cites here, as evidence to support his claim, “hundreds of
letters from all over Canada” that “protested the harshness of the
mandatory sentence.” Some of these letters, he writes, “came from
people who were themselves handicapped. Some came from church
groups” (R v Latimer, Ruling, 1997). These protesters, according to Noble,
were incensed by the “injustice of [Latimer’s] conviction, but more
particularly [by] the harshness of the sentence required by law” (R v
Latimer, Ruling, 1997).

Here, Noble is guilty of making the logical fallacy of “converse

accident:” assuming that what is true for a particular group of people
who support Latimer, is true for all Canadians (Copi & Cohen, 1990, p.
100). From a perspective that values the lives of people with
disabilities—perspectives put forward by numerous Canadians and by
the Disability-Rights Interveners in the Latimer case—leniency for
Latimer constitutes a dangerous injustice in that it sets a precedent for
how people with disabilities will be viewed and treated under the law.
Additionally, a ruling that advocates leniency for Latimer constitutes a
violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982). Using
section 12 of the Charter to favour Latimer by circumventing Canadian
criminal and minimum sentencing laws overrides section 15, which
guarantees disabled people equal protection under the law.7

In this respect, it is possible to understand Noble’s attempt to create a

new category of homicide through the manipulation of Charter
mandates and through the elicitation of public support, not only as

7
Section 15 of the Charter (1982) reads, “Every individual is equal before and
under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the
law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on
race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical
disability.”
Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2
 The Canadian Legal System, the Robert Latimer Case 199

examples of fallacious interpretation and reasoning, but also as an

example of what Copi and Cohen (1990) call, a “convenient deception”
(p. 101). This largely unconscious deception envisions, calls into being
and legitimates what Robert M. Cover (1995) calls a “nomos” or a
“normative universe” (p. 5). While law’s creation of this normative
universe is premised on a desire to build a “better world,” it does so, in
Cover’s terms, by establishing binary relationships that work to “create
and maintain a world of right and wrong, lawful and unlawful, of valid
and void” (p. 5). In doing this, law is inattentive to the way in which
these binaries, which are always read in hierarchical relation to one
another (love and pain, for instance), promote a violence that negates the
life of the “other.” If, for example, Latimer’s mercy killing is seen as
being right, Tracy’s life must be wrong; if Latimer’s actions are
considered lawful, then Tracy’s life must be considered unlawful; if
Latimer’s life and his able-bodied perspective is valid, then Tracy’s life
and the perspective of people with disabilities, precisely to the extent
that they disturb the norm, must, according to Cover’s logic, be voided.

Because Noble’s ruling establishes an essential binary between the able-

bodied and the disabled, his attempt to create a just interpretation of the
Latimer case can be read, through an examination of his omissions and
assumptions, as indicative of the way in which law, through its use of
language and representational practices, and through its tendency to
silence perspectives and deny individual experience, perpetuates and
prescribes a cultural violence (Sarat, 2001, p. 4). Because this violence is
always already contained within the normative structures and schemas
that mask violence with moral and ethical imperatives or justifications, it
is difficult to see clearly the power that this violence presupposes. From
this perspective, the disabled body “provide[s] the necessary “outside,”
if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in materializing the
norm, qualify as bodies that matter” (Butler, 1993, p. 16). More
specifically, an analysis of the legal materialization of this norm, as it
played out in the Latimer case, and Judge Noble’s decision to grant
Latimer a “constitutional exemption” and promote a new category of
acceptable murder called “compassionate homicide,” forces a
consideration of Tracy’s body, albeit after her life was taken in an

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200 Sally Hayward

untimely fashion by her “loving” father, as a body, and, concomitantly,

a life, that does indeed “matter.”

References

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York: Routledge.
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. (1982)
www.laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter
Council of Canadians with Disabilities (CCD). (1998). Latimer watch:
“Factum Excerpts” and “Exemption Quashed.”
www.ccdonline.ca
Copi, I. M., & Cohen, C. (1990. Introduction to logic (Eighth Edition). New
York: Macmillan.
Cover, R. (1995). Narrative violence and the law: The essays of Robert Cover.
M.Minow, M. Ryan, & A. Sarat. Ann Arbor: University of
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Enns, R. (1999). A voice unheard: The Latimer case and people with disabilities.
Halifax: Fernwood.
Feldman, A. (1999) Violence and vision: The prosthetics and aesthetics of
terror. Public Culture, 10 (1), 24-60.
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Her Majesty The Queen and Robert W. Latimer.(1994, November 7). Criminal
Trial. No. 37. Court of Queen’s Bench for Saskatchewan Judicial
Centre of Battleford.
Porter, J. I. (2004). Foreword. In D.T. Mitchell, & S. Snyder, The body and
physical difference: Discourses of disability. (xiii-xiv). Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
R. v. Latimer. (1997, December 1). Ruling on defence motion. No. 37
J.C.B. Queen’s Bench Judicial Centre of Battleford.
Sarat, A. Introduction: On pain and death as facts of legal life. In A. Sarat
(Ed.). Pain, death, and the law (1-14). Ann Arbor: University of
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Teubner, G. (Ed.). (1988). Autopoietic Law: A new approach to law and
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 The Canadian Legal System, the Robert Latimer Case 201

Author Note

Sally Hayward is an instructor in the Academic Writing Programme at

the University of Lethbridge, teaching rhetoric and narrative. She can be
contacted at sally.hayward@uleth.ca

Developmental Disabilities Bulletin, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2